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There comes a time in peoples lives that they will have to face certain truths. The thing about these truths is that though we know they exist, acknowledging them can sometimes be challenging. Years could go by before a persons threshold for ignoring the obvious is breached.
For years, I’d settled into my sedentary life; taking online classes, doing website design, having office jobs and spending my free time perusing the internet. As that lifestyle took hold of my life, my ass began to widen. It wasn’t something that I really noticed or cared much about. At one point, I’d lost 32 pounds by diet modification and gained it back a few months later, along with an extra 25 or so. Funny how that happens.
November of 2011 I had some sort of a seizure in my kitchen. It was likely a TIA. I was washing the dishes and talking on the phone and all of a sudden my brain began to shake. If anyone was watching me, they wouldn’t have seen anything but it felt like someone had tossed a hand full of Mexican jumping beans into my skull and my brain was just-a-shakin’ away. Remember the “Bumble Ball?” That’s what my brain was doing. It did this for about 45 seconds I’d say. It felt much longer. There was no pain involved…just shaking. So much that I couldn’t focus on anything. I told the person on the phone to hold on a minute as I tried to get myself over to the kitchen table to sit down. I thought I’d fall, but I made it. I was certain that I was having a stroke or something. Then, as quickly as the shaking brain arrived, it dissipated. I started bawling my eyes out like a little kid that just stepped off a terrifying carnival ride. A normal person would have taken themselves directly to the emergency room. I however, am as far from normal as they come and decided to quit smoking instead. That makes sense right? I figured whatever the hell was wrong with me, smoking wasn’t helping. After 30 years of smoking tobacco, I switched to electronic and have been puffing on my rechargeable cigarette ever since. I like it….but I’ll get into the e-cigarette movement in another post. So anyways…the brain shake. Yeah. Scared the shit out of me.
I’d been feeling pretty shitty up to this point – trouble sleeping, chronic back and knee pain, general lethargy, strange, middle of the night headaches which I suspect was from holding my breath until I was completely depleted of oxygen. I did go to the doctors over the headache thing because unlike my brain shake, those headaches were horrifically painful. The CT showed no brain tumors or anything wacky like that so that leaves sleep apnea. Shocking that an overweight person might have sleep apnea eh? I was sure that I was dying of something. I’d not had a physical in some time and resigned myself to the fact that I probably have type two diabetes, high blood pressure or bad levels of cholesterol. I couldn’t imagine myself living to be old. In fact, I made arrangements in case of my untimely demise with Boston University as an anatomical gift. Yep, I’ve donated my body to science. =)
in January of 2012, I got a letter from Rite Aid pharmacy, informing me that I’d reached “silver status” from using my rewards card so often. As a reward, I was given a lab request for a glucose and cholesterol screening. I made an appointment and had blood drawn at Quest labs in Portsmouth NH. A couple days later I got the results. Both my glucose and cholesterol levels were well within the normal range – and this is without fasting.
At that point I weighed 311 pounds so I thought that I should strike while the iron is hot and get cracking at a healthier lifestyle before it was too late…
and so it began. Me, a lumbering wildebeest, taking on the feat of a lifetime.
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